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Climate Change

Understanding the causes and impact.

Climate change is caused by the human production of greenhouse gases. When the gases are released into the air, it travels upwards and creates a blanket over the earth. As a result, it traps the sun's heat thus causing an increase in temperatures. These affects are experienced by humans not through the temperature increases, but also with natural disasters, rising sea levels, droughts, and health. With an understanding of climate change, policies and actions can be taken to reduce the impact for future generations.

Charts

Climate Change and Greenhouse Gase Emmissions

To start lets understand the contributors to climate change from a human perspective. In the charts below we gain an global perspective of greenhouse gases. Further along with additional charts, we dive in deeper to understand the financial and health effects of climate change.

Within the past decade, greenhouse gases have increased globally. When diving into the different economic parts of the world, based on GDP, it is appears that lower-income countries have contributed less compared to other countries.

To gain insight into the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions,using the slider, can observe how much the economic parts of the world contributed.

The charts below provide the top countries that have had high greenhouse emissions. Based on this information, it appears that the United States and China have higher emission rates that other countries. There could be additional reasons for this, such as population size or even sectors. Using the first graph, it is possible to click on the country and see the distribution within the sectors and over time as well.

Greenhouse Gas and Temperature

Greenhouse gas emissions include different types of gases. Within the US, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) compared to the other gas types has increased substantially, perhaps due to the energy industry. As a result, it appears that within the last two decades, the temperatures have remainded fairly high. The high temperatures are a concern for populations as it affects the enviroment and population health.

Climate Change Impacts due to Natural Disasters

As temperatures change due to greenhouse emissions mainly from (CO2), the enviroment tends to shift as well resulting in wildfires fires due to more droughts and less water that is accessible. Additionally, natural disasters become more prominent in areas that were not affected as much.

Economic Costs & Human Consequences

Now that we have an idea of why there has been an increase in extreme weather events, let's look deeper into the impacts that it has on not only humans but the economy as well. In the visual below, we wanted to give an overview of the relationship between the number or storms and the costs of that. Here we can see that there is a common trend, they are positively correlated. We must note that even though the number of storms are still increasing, the people impacted by it have been able to mitigate some of the costs with advancements in technology and infrastructure as we're seeing in the more recent years.

In this visual, we wanted to look into specific events that are known to be influenced as a result of the changing environments around us. For example, perhaps flooding is becomeing more of an issue since natural landscapes are changing and withering as a result of global warming and human actions such as deforestation. The casualties are also broken down but direct and indirect cases. This is becasue climate change cannot exist in a bubble- there are reprecussions that expand beyond a localized storm event.

Next, we want to put give you some perspective- not just in terms of magnitude, but also distribution of damage. In this chart, we can connect the magnitude of damage to several characteristics. One pattern you may notice is the impact to states in close proximity to coastal waters or perhaps how states with geographical features may influence them to be less prone to take damage.

Health Effects

In the following charts, we see the health effects as a result of climate change.

Despite the expense for climate in macro page, we are going to feel the results of climate change in our daily lives. Our health is also closely related to the climate change situations. Let`s start navigate it.

Hot summer always being painful for us. This graph focuses on the number of hot summers experienced. The following graph focus on the US. Based on the view, more people can feel the temperature increase from 1991 to 2010. Although the population exposed to hotter summer doesn't increase from 2010 to 2021, it is likely that as time goes on people may experience longer hot summer days over that time.

We may navigate how the temperature will change under different situation of greenhouse gas emissions. The graph represents the number of days across the year over the 95 degree F. You can play with it to see how different hot summer we will experience under different situations of greenhouse gas emssion. It is obviously that people experience much more hot days under high emission. People may live in hot days for more than 3 months under high emission as for about one month under low emission.

As the previous charts demonstrated the changes of the temperature and the excessive days experiencing hot days, the following two charts show up to 2021 the number of heat related-deaths over time. While it appears that most of the deaths occured on the West Coast, there are instances over the years, where parts of the East Coast have shown increase in heat related deaths as well. By using the play button, it is possible to see the changes over time. You can also click into one state to see gender and age distribution for specific state and year.(Due to the difficulty of collecting related data, we miss some states` data)

Overall, we may either visit hospital or experience HRI due to hot summer. We should be aware of that so we have the motivation to protect our environment.

Summary

Overall, based on the data gathered and understanding the data using the results, it is possible to see that climate change has an impact on the lives of every person living on the earth. As was seen previously, there are others that likely contribute more so to greenhouse gases. With that in mind, it means that everyone has to work together to reduce the gases. There are many policies being implemented and hopefully those will help to cool the planet.